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Monday, September 05, 2016

`The Dignity Is in Leisure'

As someone
who enjoys work and finds odious most notions of socially acceptable leisure,
I’m inspired and repelled by Melville’s letter to his cousin Catherine G.
Lansing, written on this date, Sept. 5, in 1877: “Whoever is not in the
possession of leisure can hardly be said to possess independence. They talk of
the dignity of work. Bosh. True Work is the necessity of poor humanity’s
earthly condition. The dignity is in leisure. Besides, 99 hundreths of all the
work done in the world is either foolish and unnecessary, or harmful and
wicked.”

Almost any
work undertaken in a spirit of gratitude and with a willingness to be of
service possesses dignity. For nineteen years, beginning in 1866, Melville
worked as a customs inspector in New York City. He writes to his cousin out of
bitterness, frustration and more than a little self-pity. It’s a story
romanticized long ago into legend: unappreciated writer gives up the pen and
succumbs to the demands of the market. That is, he gets a real job, which
hardly seems unreasonable, especially because he has a family to support and he
can still go on writing, if not always publishing. Death was a lucrative career
move for Melville. Slowly, after more than forty years, he became a qualified
bestseller.

Melville
is at least theoretically correct when he says “the dignity is in leisure,” though
much that passes for leisure today (video games?) is without dignity. Work, of
course, can be a form of leisure if it is fulfilling. In an interview, Dana
Gioia says: “I like to divide the day into
writing and manual labor.”